On Stage

...Overhead are a series of hand-painted signs, like vaudeville signboards, worked by a stage-manager in Ml view of the audience...

...Alan Schneider has directed, among other plays, Beckett's Happy Days and Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle...

...Critical explorations of his plays abound in the "little" magazines...

...And he is as dazzling and articulate a character as any he himself created: alternately tough and tender, sardonic and compassionate, ironic and incisive, a classicist and an iconoclast...

...With an absolutely Shakesperean abundance of plays to choose from—if and when they can be satisfactorily cut free from the Gordian shackles of the German language—and with interest growing at the rate it is, it looks more like a Brecht decade, or even century...

...At the Living Theater, one of Brecht's earliest and least effective works, In the Jungle of Cities, is again in the repertory, somewhat over-theatricalized and confused— but no longer dismissed...

...As a whole and on its own terms, the evening works...

...A Man's a Man, a more mature and less didactic effort but no less difficult, is due in the spring...

...His barbs are hardly confined to the capitalistic citadels of New York and Hollywood...

...Nor are Galileo and St...

...And the growing competition in the field of translation has spurred Bentley to revise and edit his own work considerably, to its betterment...

...He is a kind of Germanic composite of Walt Whitman, H. L. Mencken and Mort Sahl—with an Elizabethan range of imagination...

...Miss Lenya sings both the familiar and the unfamiliar, her every motion and inflection blessed with the sure economy of one who grew up on the same block of history with Brecht...

...Miss Lenya stirringly sings the spirited and haunting marching song from Mother Courage, but we would be more stirred if the wagon were rumbling behind her, and her two sons and deaf-mute daughter were at her side...

...The evening is in two parts, "Life" and "Theater," and each part progresses from simple to more elaborate materials...

...But also: " man needs help from every creature...

...Burn me," his exhortation to the bookburners who ignore his works...

...The tape, old and scratchy, begins even before the lights dim...

...Meanwhile, we continue our own so far feeble attempts to fathom the most paradoxical of contemporary playwrights and his enigmatic combination of sophistication and simplicity...

...talk to each other and to the audience...

...On occasion, one or two of them do exactly that...

...American actors, as Brecht himself says in the course of the evening, tend to make what is bold merely nice, to make history commonplace: "Instead of astonishment you work for sympathy...

...For a Marxist, he is surprisingly suspicious of order: "Where nothing is right in the right places," he says, "you've got disorder...

...gesture, move around a bit and sometimes exchange stools...

...And there are rumors of possible Broadway interest in Puntila and Caucasian Chalk Circle (with which Washington's Arena Stage opened its new theater recently...

...Eric Bentley, who was among Brecht's earliest American disciples and whose translations first brought Brecht's dramatic achievement to our attention, has recently published the most extensive volume of Brecht plays...

...Dane Clark does well with an amusing and revealing story of an actor who cannot decide which of two hats to choose for his role...

...In a reedy monotone, Brecht sings "Mack the Knife," rolling his German r's as blantly as Jack Pearl once did...

...They move us with Brecht's numerous insights into mankind's, and his own, frailty: Anne Jackson quietly tells of a young woman who had to kill her child...

...Brecht's influence on the Englishlanguage theater abroad has also been evident in such "Brechtian" productions as last season's The Hostage (now revived off-Broadway) and this year's A Man for All Seasons...

...Even before the current production, the groundswell of interest in Brecht's work was increasingly felt...

...Both Mother Courage and Arturo Vi have been announced by commercial managements...

...What seemed missing was any real feeling that husband and wife loved each other and that die marriage had been working...

...Played with great sincerity and depth of feeling by George Voskovec and Viveca Lindfors, it makes us experience the anguish and guilt of the last few minutes before the flight of a Jewish wife from her unsuspecting, but ultimately willing, husband in the early days of Hitler's terror...

...We might even get one of his plays properly staged and performed...

...They see to it that we are not bored: Michael Wager engagingly points out the faults of some New York actors...

...At the opening of Brecht on Brecht, one of the evening's set of producers, speculating hopefully in the lobby, whispered: "It looks like a Brecht year...

...the later ones turn out to be ballads, narratives, epics...

...How exhausting it is to be evil" is Brecht's comment on an ancient Japanese mask...

...Brecht on Brecht is a "theatricalized reading" of portions of the late poet-dramatist's scattered writings...

...Staged by Gene Frankel and originally presented in ANTA's Matinee Series some weeks ago by Lucille Lortel, it was warmly greeted by everyone, with the possible exceptions of some orthodoxly conservative papers and Konrad Adenauer...

...They have been brought together, arranged and largely translated by George Tabori—himself a playwright who is currently adapting Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Vi for American production...

...The floor should have been dirtier, the stools not quite so new...

...Miss Jackson is again touching in a short scene and pantomime from The Good Woman of Setzuan, but the eye is cheated and the texture of the play barely defined...

...Where in the right places there is nothing, that's order...

...Upstage left, and dominating the stage, is a huge photograph of Brecht, cigar in hand and gazing at the audience with quizzical detachment, his special pride and trademark...

...There is no curtain...

...This is only the beginning...

...a bench and a few props are added later...

...Upstage right, also fully visible, there is a tape-recorder console and someone to work it...

...In the background, at times, there is Brecht's own voice from the tape...

...On stage are six plain, high stools, arranged in a simple but interesting pattern...

...My only quarrel with Wolfgang Roth's "non-setting" is that it is too deliberately an imitation of Brechtian visual design, too antiseptic...

...ON STAGE An Evening with Bertolt Brecht By Alan Schneider If we cannot have Bertolt Brecht's Gargantuan and dazzling extravaganzas rilling our stages —too difficult to cast and too expensive to produce in Broadway's palaces, too outsize for off-Broadway's holes-in-the-wall—at least we now have Brecht himself (Brecht on Brecht, Theater de Lys...

...In large part, this is because many have seen the work of the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht's own theater company in East Berlin...

...Part Two is not as successful, though it manages to build to a shattering climax...

...After the uprising of June 1953, he suggests to "the Party hacks of the Stalinallee" that since the people had lost the Government's confidence, perhaps the Government should simply dissolve the people...

...He was born two years prior to the expiration of the 19th, but every one of his words, even through the mouths and talents of others, speaks eloquently and pointedly of the convulsions which distinguish the 20th, especially the era between the two wars...

...There are some thoughts on the practicalities of playwriting and the cliches of casting actors...

...Somewhat altered and expanded (Lotte Lenya is now present as both actress and songstress), it has been installed at the same theater which housed The Threepenny Opera for seven years...

...To outlive it...

...the parting would then have been not only cruel but heartbreaking...

...Who knows...

...They make us laugh at Ms sometimes sardonic, sometimes Talmudic humor: George Voskovec proves quite reasonably and gently that the Nazis were really Jews...

...and occasionally pretend to be someone else...

...Perhaps the Europeans in the company dig a bit more deeply, because of the special abrasiveness of their talents...

...We miss not a syllable of Brecht's double-barreled message: "In man's markets I have seen how man is bought and sold...

...They happen to be very excellent actors, stars and non-stars, a mixture of American amiability and vitality and European Weltschmerz...

...Obviously, playwrights and directors all over the Western world are being strongly affected by his style of writing and production...

...In Part One, for example, the first poems are like Japanese haiku in structure and length...

...and Threepenny, after all, had to survive a largely inadequate production...

...they have even reached the sacred halls of Time...

...The Good Woman of Setzuan at the Phoenix was, for whatever reasons, even more of a disaster...

...There is "only one way to fight authority," he says...

...With calm yet halting deliberateness, he testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee, hesitating on the question of his birthdate's correct century...

...They speak or read from the bound texts which they carry...

...When she is in control of her careening emotional intensity, as in her farewells to friends on the telephone, Miss Lindfors is magnetic...

...His is a world in which passports are more valuable than human beings, mediocrity a greater conqueror than tyrants...

...Galileo, as done by ANTA's Experimental Theater of a decade ago, was simply dismissed...

...However, "The Jewish Wife," a complete scene from Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, is compelling...

...Taking turns through the evening's proceedings, the actors come on, smoothly, crisply...

...Part One ends too soon...

...Brecht used to say that real beauty came only through use...

...loan of the Stockyards more than faintly suggested by their all-toobrief and all-too-bare excerpts...

...In the tradition of the Sean O'Casey autobiography readings and Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, the production effectively— and, for Brecht, characteristically —combines bareness with high theatricality...